by
Andrea Thaxton KaffenbergerThe Courier Your Messenger For The River Valley

12:00 PM, Tuesday, July 03 2012 | 3024 views | 6 | 5 | |

Alderman Sean Rehm does not want dogs dropped on his farm.

After responding in Thursday’s paper on an article in a local paper about a city council meeting in Atkins, concerning stray cats, I received a call from Alderman Sean Rehm demanding that I retract my statement that read, “no one, other than possibly Alderman Sean Rehm, wants stray cats and dogs dropped on them.”

Alderman Rehm also said per our phone conversation that if one dog was dropped at his place, he would sue me. Well, that’s great for him to have someone to sue. But, who does my mom sue over the 10 dogs that were dropped at her home this last year?

Although I quoted a local paper about Rehm having said at the council meeting that “people drop off cats at his farm and he welcomes some to combat the mouse and rat problem,” it seems that Rehm’s statement was only partially true.

Rehm told me that he only allows people to put cats on his farm with his prior approval. How nice for him. I would love for everyone that was going to drop stray cats or dogs at my house to call ahead and ask if it was all right first.

Mayor Barrett must have been on Rehm’s approval list as he admitted, in the same local paper in a second article, that cats had already been trapped and taken to the Rehm farm.

Hopefully Barrett or Rehm made a stop at the vet for some altering first.

Unfortunately, if the cats living on the Rehm farm are not altered, each female cat can have as many as 12 kittens a year.

So let us do the math, if there are five female cats now, in one year there could be as many as 65 cats, assuming that these cats are not finding a new home down the road somewhere.

Just how many rats and mice can one farm have?

Of course, if Rehm is having the cats spayed and neutered there is nothing to worry about.

The Game and Fish Commission in Heber Springs is dealing with a similar problem with upward of a 1,000 feral cats that began from a single dump site.

Their solution is to trap at night and take the cats to their local shelter, where they pay for the cats to be euthanized.

All this time, money and lives could have been saved if people would quit dropping animals

Rehm also said that I must not know anything about country living. A person does not have to think dropping animals is okay just because they live in the country. I have lived in the country, on or near chicken farms, my entire life and consider dropping animals criminal, as do our state laws.

It is sad to me that the only thing Alderman Rehm got from my response was a fear that people were going to drop animals on him, which just proves my point that “no one (that I know of) wants animals dropped on them.” So here is my retraction: Alderman Sean Rehm did not say that he wanted cats and dogs dropped at his farm.

For those who doubt where I stand concerning animals: I love them. I want them spayed and neutered, loved and fed. I do not want them allowed to breed indiscriminately or left to fend for themselves.

Licensing and laws do nothing to curb a cat problem. If cats are required to be licensed then cat-lovers just stop putting collars on their cats, as they did by me. And they won't even bother getting them micro-chipped, especially not that They want absolutely nothing that can hold them legally responsible, liable, and accountable for the actions of their cats. It's why many of them even keep cats in the first place. We're not talking about the topmost responsible citizens of the world, you know. They don't want that responsibility of what their cat has done coming back on them. If they had even one iota of a sense of responsibility and respect for all other lives on this planet we wouldn't even be having these discussions.

On the other hand, I found something that DOES work, and works well, and works fast (compared to the years it takes to try to reason with ignorant cat-lovers who just relentlessly lie to you and do NOTHING to solve the problem they created). Where I live the cat-lovers quickly learned that, collar or not, their cats get shot on-sight no matter what.

The ONLY thing that works is destroying any of their cats found outdoors on your property. They either learn to stop getting more cats that die under the wheels of cars or from animal attacks, or they finally learn how to be a responsible pet owner, respectful neighbor, and learn to keep their invasive species animal under confined supervision, as it should be. Win win win all around. You can either destroy their cat for them humanely, or let their lack of concern for their cat cause it to die inhumanely. Your choice. By destroying their cat humanely you are showing them that you care more about their cat than even they do.

You can't train a cat to stay home but I found that, in time, you CAN train a cat-owner into being a responsible pet-owner and a respectable neighbor. Most of them are so phenomenally stupid, disrespectful, and criminally irresponsible though that you have to make at least 12-15 of their cats permanently disappear before they even start to figure out what they've been doing wrong all during their sorry, useless, and pathetic lives.

In fact, some of them are so incredibly stupid that you have to shoot and bury HUNDREDS of their cats before they start to learn. As they were by me. And contrary to cat-lovers' oft-spewed "vacuum effect" LIES, not ONE cat has replaced them in over 2 years now. Simple reason being: CATS ATTRACT CATS. Get rid of every last one and there's none there to attract more of them. Should even ONE cat step paw on your land ever again? Shoot on sight, A.S.A.P. Or you'll be up to your a** in cats again, destroying all your wildlife and spreading their deadly diseases again, in no time.

If you live in an area where its not legal to use firearms to destroy any animal that is harming the health, safety, and well-being of you, your family, or your own animals (as it is legal in most every area of the nation); then check into laws regarding air-rifles. Ones with ballistics speeds of 700-1200 fps and using pointed vermin-pellets are often advised for use on vermin in no-firearms zones. Many of the newer ones even come with their own sound-suppressor designs built-in. Failing that, then there's always the SSS and TDSS Cat Management Programs that are exploding in popularity worldwide. Shoot, Shovel, & Shut-Up; or Trap, Drown, Shovel, & Shut-Up. Both methods are legal on every square foot of this earth. No local laws were violated if it never happened!

It doesn't matter if dumping cats on someone else is legal or not, doing so is being just as criminally irresponsible and disrespectful to all life on the planet as those waste-of-flesh cat-lovers that dumped cats in your lap, no matter how they got there. Do the responsible and respectful thing, destroy those cats and safely dispose of their carcasses so they can't go on to infect even more wildlife with their deadly diseases even after they are dead.

The problem on my land was caused by idiot cat-lovers who kept adopting unwanted cats. Over the years their cats annihilated all the native wildlife on my lands. All fox, hawks, owls, skunks, raccoons, opossum, turkeys, grouse, quail, pheasant, songbirds, chipmunks, and myriad other native species had disappeared for over 15 years. Cats used the animals or their offspring for their cats' tortured play-toys, or the animals starved to death from cats having annihilated the natural food-chain.

No amount of trying to reason with these morons would stop them. So on advice of the sheriff I shot and buried every last one of their lousy invasive-species pets. Collared or not. Even as I was shooting hundreds of cats they kept adopting and releasing MORE of them. Those too eventually shot and buried, until my land was 100% cat-free. The wildlife has been coming back now that the cats are gone, for over 2 years.

Until recently. When the same morons adopted 5 more cats last week. Those too were swiftly shot and buried. The land is once again 100% invasive-species-cat-free. Some idiots never learn.

Interesting note: One winter I tried feeding one of the shot-dead cats on my land to the last few starving opossum (all the rest of my larger native wildlife starved to death from cats destroying all their food sources). Those opossum promptly died from some disease in that cat-meat. Alarming -- in that opossum, due to their cooler body temperatures, cannot contract nor transmit many common diseases, not even rabies. They are one of the most disease-free animals in N. America. Yet ... something in that cat-meat was able to kill them all. Cats truly are complete and total wastes of flesh. They can't even be used to feed wild animals safely. Leaving any of these invasive-species cats out in nature, alive OR dead, is no better than intentionally poisoning your native wildlife to death.

I am enjoying your passion. we are very definitely of one mind on this matter. I used to have the most beautiful turkeys. One year twenty three hens and two gobblers. Then people began abandoning cats in atkins. Now there is almost no wildlife.

Until we have a direct influence on the course of city administration in atkins, nothing in this intellectual/economic wasteland will change.

I suppose I can share all the creative ways I found to get rid of every last one. Like: Making a cat-call from an MP3 player and battery-powered pocket speakers and loading it up with sounds from hundreds of cat-lovers' sites online. (Saying, "here kitty kitty" makes a stray or feral cat hide all the more. Most run from unknown voices, true ferals run from any human sounds.) Using their own sounds is how I was able to draw some of the most wary of them out of hiding. Curiosity DOES kill the cat. (Sage advice handed-down from generations past.) I also learned the predator-calls of my local gray-squirrels to have them help me spot and hunt them down. Using them (or were they using me?) like well-trained hunting dogs. Pointers with a much-advantaged aerial view. You can even tell which way a cat had gone in the woods by listening which direction the squirrels' predator-calls would spread. They make a different sound for a cat than they do for a hawk. (Quite fascinating once I figured out part of their language.) Or using an IR video surveillance system and attracting them from 1/2 mile away with fish-oils along the roads right to food-dish in the yard. Watching for them in the comfort of my living room. If using this method; once spotted, turn off indoor lights, SLOWLY and QUIETLY open the door, aim (laser-sight and illuminated-reticle scope to the rescue). They're skittish as all get out. But this method turns your whole home and land into a 100% fatal cat-trap. Getting rid of ALL strays in your area. EXTREMELY effective because cats, stray or feral, are genetically-predisposed to seek out human habitation. Got more than half this way.

You are wrong on one thing though, no politician nor lawmaker will touch this issue in a responsible way. If they do the right thing and demand a bounty on all cats, they lose the cat-lovers' votes and lose their cushy job. If they do the wrong thing by supporting cat-lovers or doing nothing (same thing), then we lose our planet. They're all caught in a disastrous catch-22 of their own making. (Nobody would think twice on how to solve this if pet-rat owners or pet-snake owners were as criminally-irresponsible and psychotic at these pet-cat lovers.)

This is why the responsibility is going to have to fall on each individual and using all pre-existing laws to destroy all cats on your own. Be that defending yourself, family, animals, and property from harm from a deadly disease-carrying animal (perfectly legal everywhere); or employing all enforceable invasive-species laws in the required eradication of all free-roaming cats.

Just as the demented cat-lovers have taken it upon themselves to violate all these laws with their cats and TNR nonsense, it now falls on the shoulders of every responsible citizen to destroy the very animal they are using to violate all these laws. Once their cats are gone there's absolutely nothing they can do about it. This is why SSS and TDSS Cat Management are exploding in popularity in every community across the planet. Law-makers are spineless or just that incredibly stupid, and cat-lovers already know how to get around all the laws. Now it's everyone else's turn to stop them in any way possible.

(In the rare instances that you cannot legally use firearms or air-rifles, or the cats have already learned to evade any trapping method (to trap & drown); then 1-adult-strength, inexpensive, generic Acetaminophine (Paracetamol, overseas), pain-relievers are sometimes used. These are much more species specific than any other vermin poison, also harmful only to some reptile species which won't be eating the foods you put it in. But this is irresponsible, as that cat really needs to be able to be retrieved and disposed of safely due to the diseases they spread even after death.)

And don't let any lying and deceiving cat-lover try to tell you that all this is illegal. Cats are ROUTINELY destroyed by shooting or drowning around any gestating livestock on farms and ranches to protect their valuable livestock's offspring dying from cats' Toxoplasmosis parasites.

They are right about one thing only -- shoot to maim is punishable under the laws that define animal-cruelty. But shoot to kill is a perfectly legal way to humanely destroy an animal. The same laws that apply to methods of humanely hunting animals also applies to cats. Unlike cat-lovers' psychotic beliefs, the reality is that a cat is just another animal. It's NOT their baby, their child, their offspring. Even if they do view their cats that way, letting them roam free is no less criminally irresponsible than them telling their child to go play in the freeway and then blaming the cars for their child's death. If they let their cat roam free, NO MATTER HOW IT DIES, that is THEIR fault and they can be charged with all laws that clearly define animal-neglect, animal-abandonment, and animal-endangerment. Including violating all invasive-species laws on earth.

In fact, here's a publication from a study done by the University of Nebraska on the best ways to HUMANELY deal with a feral-cat problem wherever you live. This documentation INCLUDES the best firearms, ammo, and air-rifles required to HUMANELY destroy cats. deenawinter.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/ec1781.pdf

Though avoid any trapping methods suggested. Trapping is slower than cats' breeding rates. This is why Trap & Kill was a failure and Trap & Sterilize is an even bigger failure. "Hunted to Extinction" (or extirpation of all outdoor cats, in this case) is the ONLY method that is faster than a species can out-breed and out-adapt to. Especially a species as prolific as these man-made cats that can breed 2-4X's faster than any naturally occurring cat-species. Good luck!

Atkins aldermen fail to do anything about most anything. People have been speaking about the cat problem in Atkins for quite some time. It would seem to be some measure of poetic justice for the feral felines that are trapped to be relocated to a place where they can be a problem to these people.

If you are part of the boss hog system, you are given a free pass as far as civil codes are concerned. Rehm is my alderman, and has been useless to me. The city of Atkins is not well served by a mayor/alderman system. We need a city manager.

All I need is a few more signatures of registered voters, and it can be made to happen.